Despite the ongoing debate around global warming, rising sea levels are already a dangerous reality in some areas of the world.

In September, ProPublica published its Losing Ground interactive, using satellite imagery to explain the issue of disappearing wetlands in Louisiana.

Speaking at a Hacks/Hackers meeting in London yesterday, Brian Jacobs, a Knight-Mozilla fellow at ProPublica, described how Losing Ground combines satellite imagery and maps with photography, audio and text-based reporting.

"It starts with a regional understanding [of the area]...and then it zooms in and you can interact with the timeline above and see how the land has changed," he said.

To illustrate how the wetlands have changed since 1932, Jacobs said he wanted to present the topic "on a more emotional scale" as people "can become numb" to statistics.

ProPublica partnered with The Lens, an investigative news team based in New Orleans, to provide a combination of data visualisation and on the ground reporting.

A close-up showing 'farmland replaced by open water' in Leeville (2009). Screenshot from ProPublica.org.

"A big part of this project was the satellite imagery," he said. "These views that we're showing depended heavily on having a picture of today, and showing a clear difference between land and water."

ProPublica's visualisation was created from data obtained freely from NASA, as well as historical maps from Louisiana State University and data from US Geological Survey (USGS).

Using satellite imagery from NASA made it possible for the team to process data in ways other tools like Google Earth, for example, would not allow.

Jacobs said Google Earth gave a cloudless representation of the Earth, which meant the visualisation was in fact "an aggregation of time" as pixels containing clouds were recreated from previous data.

"You get beautiful imagery like this, but then you lose that snapshot of time," he said. "Time was really important for us so we became 'space journalists' and started to process this stuff [NASA satellite imagery]."

Colour processing was a big part of the project, and Jacobs said there were a variety of tools journalists could use for working with the data. He highlighted Photoshop and open-source photo editing programme GIMP as good places to start.

A full list of tools and resources for 'storytelling from space' can be found on GitHub.